James
Buchan, having endured the Irving libel case,
concludes that the defeated author, like the Mitford
girls in the 1930s, sees the Nazis as funny folk

Amid the general satisfaction at the High
Court judgment in Irving
v Lipstadt and Penguin Books on
11 April, the Tehran Times sounded a recessional note. In an
editorial two days later, the newspaper regretted that the
British writer David Irving had so comprehensively lost his
Holocaust libel case.

"One of the biggest frauds of the outgoing century that
dragged into the new millennium was the story of the
Holocaust made up by the Zionists to blackmail the west,"
the Tehran Times wrote. Irving was one of many writers who
had "proved with evidence that the so-called Nazi gas
chambers could not accommodate six million Jews, and that
the story of the Holocaust was only a sheer historical
lie".

This sort of argument, standard for the embattled
hardliners in Iran, would be of little interest but for
another trial, which began on that same Thursday in the city
of Shiraz in southern Iran. Thirteen Iranians of Jewish
origin, mostly shopkeepers, are on trial for their lives on
charges of spying for Israel. The prosecution says that four
of the defendants have confessed. One of their lawyers
denies that. It seems there are places, Shiraz and London's
Strand, where anti-Semitism
will not lie down and die.

Not since Oscar Wilde brought his case against the
Marquess of Queensberry for calling him a "somdomite"
(sic) has a libel action in this country so demolished its
claimant. Irving will not, like poor Wilde, face a criminal
prosecution in this country. Britain is not France or
Germany, where it is a criminal offence to question the Nazi
extermination of the Continental Jews between 1941 and 1945.
Banned from the German historical archives and the country
itself, harried by Jewish organisations, spurned by
commercial publishers, and isolated from the intellectual
mainstream, Irving now faces court costs of over
£1.5m.

Irving, who has specialised in the history of the Third
Reich since the 1960s, in 1996 sued Deborah E
Lipstadt, Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust
Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, for defamation. He
claimed that she had libelled him in her 1993 book,
Denying the Holocaust: the
growing assault on truth and memory, and conspired with
Jewish organisations to put pressure on publishers to
deprive him of his livelihood.

In the book, which was published in Britain the next year
and hence came within the jurisdiction of English libel
courts, Lipstadt accused Irving of distorting the history of
the Third Reich in the service of an extreme right-wing
cause. As an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler, she
wrote, Irving misrepresented data so as to exonerate him of
complicity in the massacre of the European Jews. Further,
Irving had allied himself with other right-wing extremists
in Britain, North America and Germany, many of whom deny
that the Holocaust ever took place.

After 32 days of evidence, and a month's private
deliberation, Mr Justice Charles Gray ruled just
that. In the age of postmodernist historiography, of false
memory and an anti-authoritarian approach to historical
documents, Gray stuck to the copybook headings of
objectivity and common sense. The elderly Jews who left
Court 73 fearful that somehow their experiences were on
trial need not have been so anxious. "I am satisfied that in
most of the instances cited by the defendants, Irving has
significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively
examined, reveals," the judge ruled.

Moreover, this "falsification of
the historical record was deliberate and . . . Irving was
motivated by a desire to present events in a manner
consistent with his own ideological beliefs". As Irving
sat, lantern-jawed and with a ferocious frown, minus his
coat which had been stained by an egg at the entrance to
the Courts of Justice, Gray called him "anti-Semitic", a
"racist" and a "pro-Nazi polemicist".

In retrospect, the defence used a sledgehammer to crack a
nut. Penguin Books, owned by the newly dotcommed Pearson
plc, assembled a team of experts to pore through Irving's
30-odd books in English and German down to the source notes.
Scholars paraded into the witness box to argue that when he
misread "haben zu bleiben" as "Juden zu bleiben" in
Himmler's handwritten telephone log of 1 December 1941, he
did so to exonerate Hitler of the massacre of the Jews: for
the incorrect second phrase means "Jews to remain where they
are" and thus not be shipped eastwards to their deaths.

At
the same time, to expose Irving's political activity,
especially during the upsurge in radical rightist politics
in Germany at the turn of the 1990s, the defence lawyers
sought and gained access to his correspondence, video- and
audio-tapes of rabble-rousing speeches and a bombastic
journal that runs, according to Irving, to 20 million words.
Poor Penguin: the chances of recovering its costs from
Irving are low, while the glory of the case has accrued to
the combative Lipstadt, her solicitor, Anthony Julius
(right) and her silk,
Richard Rampton.

Irving is an indomitable figure. Though he looked
downcast at the judgment, he was soon on his feet, vowing he
would appeal. He has suffered at least four other libel
defeats. In one case, arising from his 1967 book, The
Destruction of Convoy PQ17, he was ordered on appeal to
pay £40,000, or the equivalent of about £350,000
in today's money. Those who believe Irving is a cynic say
that if he cannot have fame and the respect of his peers, he
will accept notoriety, lecture fees at revisionist
congresses in the US, and the adoration of anti-Semites and
right-wing blondes.

I doubt he is so uncomplex. Invariably courteous to this
reporter through the trial, gallant to the ladies of the
defence team, he could pass for a gentleman-scholar who
occasionally says some very odd things. He believes Mayfair
will soon be a black district, and at one moment addressed
Mr Justice Gray as mein Fuhrer. His response to the judgment
on his website - OUCH! - simply did
not correspond to the scale of his defeat.

Irving does not appear to see that his comments on
Auschwitz and its
survivors lack charm. When he talks of the Nazis or the
extreme right in modern Germany, he uses the harmless patois
of the upper-class British appeasers of the 1930s, who
converted the shipwreck of their cause into a great big
tease of the middle class. Irving despises politically
correct Britain and democracy-by-numbers Germany, but
anglicises the Third Reich in the fashion of the Mitford
girls. His Nazis are funny folk.

Yet he is passionate, even frantic, to defend his
peculiar picture of the Third Reich. As the trial wound on,
he fought a series of rearguard actions to deny or question
notorious historical events: the systematic shooting of Jews
on the Eastern front; the use of gas vans at Chelmno in
Poland; the gassing of Jews at the Sobibor, Treblinka
and Belsen
camps; Hitler's knowledge of those actions.

Even after he had conceded those events took place,
Irving would try to deny them, which had Rampton
often on his feet. His last stand was what he calls the
"holes in the roof". He claimed that a certain building at
Auschwitz could not have been a gas chamber because its
roof, now in ruins, has no ducts for the introduction of the
cyanide as described by eyewitnesses. This position,
which requires us to ignore the
evidence of eyewitnesses and the war crimes trials,
was overrun by Gray in a moment.

Why Irving has sacrificed his fortune and reputation on
the altar of a dead German dictator is beyond me to say. It
sounds tragic, but it isn't. The tragedy was the Third
Reich, not this commentary on it two generations later. In
truth, Irving v Lipstadt was a farce: sad, foolish, tedious
beyond description, rather disgusting.

Website comment: Mr Buchan's
article was originally written at the commission of the New
York Times. The NY Times decided not to publish it, and
readers may be able to understand why. Incidentally, among
hundreds of other errors, Mr Irving has not lost four libel
action s; no Jews were gassed at Belsen, etc etc
etc.

April 24, 2000

Website
fact: The stamina of the
defence team was aided by a six million dollar fund provided
by Stephen Spielberg, Edgar J Bronfman, and the American
Jewish Committee, which enabled them to pay 21 lawyers and
"experts"; the experts like Evans, Longerich were paid up to
£109,000 each to testify as they did (while the
defence's star legal team was paid considerably more).
Nobody was paying for Mr Irving, who has been fighting this
battle for three whole years. Nor did he pay his defence
witnesses one cent or sous: they testified from conviction,
not for reward. [Help!]